Huwebes, Hunyo 25, 2015

According to renowned stock exchange expert’s BlackRock the fall of the Chinese
stock market is inevitable despite Chinese President Xi Jinping government
rallying the market through central bank’s rate cuts, tweaking margin-trading
rules, slowing the pace of initial public offerings, and taking up share prices.

"The tide is going to go out, and
there’s going to be a lot of people without their swimming trunks on,"
strategist Ewen Cameron Watt of BlackRock told Bloomberg Television, borrowing
from Warren Buffett's observation about investors caught swimming naked when
markets get shaky.

Some of the factors, economists see, on
the plunge of the Chinese economy are anchored to its U.S $28 trillion of
public and private debt and its unprecedented $363 billion of margin debt
that's supporting those shares.

Demand of steel among Chinese
manufacturers and building makers are collapsing because many investors shifted
their shops to labour cheap Vietnam and Cambodia.

The decline from the ballyhooed double
digit growth in the past decades to a single digit and declining, 7%, of
China’s Gross Domestic Product undermined the fate of the Chinese workers.

With a slowing economy feared to be
gobbled by an explosion of a stock bubble, are the Chinese bracing for the
worst?

In case economic hardship caught with the
Sinos, would the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) starts a shooting war in the
South China Sea (SCS) versus the United States, Japan, Australia, and some
members of the South East Asean Nations to divert the attention of its people
who would rise up and probably replaced the apparatchiks at the CCP?

Nánshā or the Spratly Islands spark
a patriotic cord to the Chinese whenever foreign powers claim ownership to them.

This scenario had happened with the
military Junta in Argentina in April 2, 1981 when it was losing a popular
support from the masses who protested in the streets the government because of
the country’s devastating economic stagnation and patent human rights
violations of the military brass.

Recently, political
columnist Mortz C. Ortigoza of Northern Watch interviewed former Philippines
5-Time Speaker Jose de Venecia on the pressing issues that caused jittery to
the world on the aggressive reclamation and arbitrary possession of islands and
reefs by Mainland China being claimed too by other countries at the South China
Sea (SCS). De Venecia, known as a political connoisseur, is the founding
chairman and co-chairman of the International Conference of Asian, Political
Parties (ICAPP). Excerpts:

NORTHERN WATCH (NW): In the book of Bill Hayton’s South China Sea
you mentioned at the 3rd Congress of the International Conference of Political
Parties in Beijing in 2004 that “we should not allow regional differences” on
the problems in the Spratly Islands.

It mentioned there
that at your behest the Department of Energy under Undersecretary Eduardo
Manalac signed with Mainland China a joint maritime seismic undertaking.

In case you became the
Prime Minister on that time, do you think this crisis at the Spratly and
Scarborough Shoals between China and the Philippines would not happen?

JOSE DE VENECIA (JDV): We signed it already (chuckle). We signed
already on the agreement and we had peace of normalcy on the South China Sea
for three or four years!

NW: But if you are still with the government now do you think these
brouhahas on the SCS would still be happening?

JDV: Well, first we should revived the agreement, continue with the
seismic agreement, preparatory drilling of the hydro carbon potential there. And
then after that even before that we agree on the equitable project sharing.
“Philippines this is your share, China this is your share, Vietnam this is your
share, Malaysia you’re farther away, Brunei you’re father away this is your
share. Everybody agrees together with Taiwan - okay, let’s start drilling.
During the time of drilling, we’ll invite the Americans to drill for us. We
invite the Europeans to drill for us, or we can ask the Chinese, because they
have so many oil rigs and some of the largest rigs in Asia and the world will
ask China, you do conduct the drilling for us. So aside from your share and the
hydro carbon, you will get another specific fee for the drilling the wells,
which we will be paying anyhow to the Europeans or to the Americans.

NW: Like the German,
Norwegian, and the British formula at Ecofisk in the North Seas?